Comparison with other tools
The following table provides a comparison of Numbat with other scientific calculators and programming languages. This comparison is certainly not objective, as we only list criteria that we consider important. If you think that a tool or language is missing or misrepresented, please let us know.
| Numbat | Qalculate | Kalker | GNU Units | Frink | Wolfram Alpha | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FOSS License | MIT, Apache-2.0 | GPL-2.0 | MIT | GPL-3.0 | ❌ | ❌ |
| Interfaces | ||||||
| Command-line | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Web version | ✓ | ❌ | ✓ | ❌ | ❌ | ✓ |
| Graphical | ❌ | ✓ | ❌ | ❌ | (✓) | ✓ |
| Units | ||||||
| Comprehensive list of units | ✓ | ✓ | ❌ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Custom units | ✓ | ✓ | ❌ | ✓ | ✓ | ❌ |
| Physical dimensions | ✓ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Currency conversions | ✓ | ✓ | ❌ | ❌ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Date and time calculations | ✓ | ✓ | ❌ | ❌ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Language features | ||||||
| Custom functions | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ❌ | ✓ | ❌ |
| Real programming language | ✓ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✓ | ? |
| Strongly typed | ✓ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Calculator features | ||||||
| Symbolic calculations | ❌ | (✓) | ❌ | ❌ | (✓) | ✓ |
| Hex/Oct/Bin mode | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Complex numbers | ❌ (#180) | ✓ | ✓ | ❌ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vectors, Matrices | ❌ | ✓ | ✓ | ❌ | ✓ | ✓ |
Detailed comparison
- Qalculate is a fantastic calculator with a strong support for units and conversions. If you don’t need the full power of a programming language, Qalculate is probably more feature-complete than Numbat.
- Frink is a special-purpose programming language with a focus on scientific calculations and units of measurement. The language is probably more powerful than Numbat, but lacks a static type system. It’s also a imperative/OOP language, while Numbat is a functional/declarative language. Frink is not open-source.
- GNU Units is probably the most comprehensive tool in terms of pre-defined units. Numbat makes it very easy to define custom units. If you think that a unit should be part of the standard library, please let us know.
- Wolfram Alpha is a very powerful tool, but it’s focused on single-line queries instead of longer computations. The query language lacks a strict syntax (which some might consider a feature). The tool is not open source and sometimes has limitations with respect to the number/size of queries you can make.
Other interesting tools / languages
- F# is the only programming language that we know of that comes close in terms of having an expressive type system that is based on units of measure. In fact, Numbats type system is heavily inspired by F#, except that it uses physical dimensions instead of physical units on the type level. Both languages have feature full type inference. F# is not listed above, as it’s not really suitable as a scientific calculator.